Crip Trip: The weight of care
and the power of friendship

Fred cracked wide open. First came the resentment, a sour thing bubbling up during the seemingly endless care routines. Then came the guilt, hitting harder than any physical strain. After all, Daniel was his best buddy, and it wasn’t his fault. Full-time care became brutal emotional labour piled onto physical exhaustion, day after day after day.

By some miracle, probably helped by humour, inappropriate jokes, and a lot of shouting, Fred and Daniel didn’t fall apart. They were stitched together with friendship, banter, and stubbornness, and found a way to survive the mental storms that brewed inside that dilapidated RV.

And they caught it all on camera.

The series isn’t polished. It’s gloriously raw, stuffed with wrong turns, fried tempers, and too many moments where you think, “Oh no . . . they’re not really going to do that, are they?” (Spoiler alert: they do.) Yet somewhere in the madness, you’re hit with the real deal, the shocking, infuriating truth about living with a disability in a world built for everyone else but them.

Underneath the laughter, a bigger storm brews. Crip Trip lifts the lid on how care work—vital, life-saving, daily care work—is treated with scant regard by policymakers. In North America, the system locks disabled people into poverty, limits their care hours to absurd, laughable minimums, and then acts surprised when people burn out or disappear into institutions. And no, this isn’t an exaggeration for dramatic flair. Daniel lived it. His mother cared for him for 30 years with no pay, sacrificing her own health while fighting a system that pretended Daniel’s needs did not exist. When he fought for more hours, it was a heartless bureaucratic nightmare seemingly designed to keep people with disabilities living in poverty.

“Poverty is such an intrinsic part of this process in North America,” Daniel said. “You simply can’t escape it, and you can’t get enough care hours. The system doesn’t work—every disabled person we met said the same thing.” He continued, “It simply is not a functional system.”

Fred saw it up close for the first time, and through this series, you will too.

The pair didn’t just stumble across these ugly truths. They went looking. Meeting other disabled artists and activists along the way, they found the same crushing barriers repeating themselves: no support, no autonomy, no real escape. Yet Crip Trip never sinks into misery. They knew that delivering an angry lecture would have audiences bolting faster than you can say “government cuts.” So instead, they loaded up on sharp jokes, ridiculous stunts, and enough chaotic banter to stock an entire pub for a year. And it’s genuinely hilarious. You can’t possibly endure a nightmare RV shower scene with these two best friends without learning to laugh. At one point, Fred ditched his clothes entirely because trying to shower Daniel fully dressed in a bathroom roughly the size of a cereal box was about as effective as fighting a house fire with a water pistol. You don’t survive constipation, broken toilets, and the relentless, soul-shaking mystery of “what the hell is that smell?” in a rolling tin can without weaponising humour as both shield and sword. Daniel, completely unfazed, treated the whole ordeal with the kind of deadpan sarcasm usually reserved for sitcom characters who’ve fully given up on life—and it’s glorious.